Opinion: The debate about the debate – Ann Coulter

Debate winner: Candy Crowley of CNN. In 2012, she – the moderator – intervened in a debate between Romney and Obama to check Mitt Romney’s statements with a lie. But unlike ABC’s top anchors on Tuesday night, she did so at least only once.

I’m exhausted from fact-checking by ABC’s fact-checkers, so I’ll just tell you about a brilliant experiment that showed pretty conclusively who won the Trump-Clinton debates in 2016.

The media says Trump failed on Tuesday night, but we were told that in 2016, too. It could also be that Kamala Harris came across as Hillary Clinton’s smirker – MSNBC’s trademark. You’ve probably forgotten this – if you ever knew it – but despite Clinton’s supposedly disastrous debate performance with Trump, she failed. There is scientific evidence.

When Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman” at one of the debates, feminists were overjoyed and stormed out of the hall with T-shirts, badges, backpacks and other merchandise that said “nasty woman.” Since feminists usually have their finger on the pulse of the nation, it never occurred to them that she might be evil.

Trump responded to Clinton’s rude remark – and described her plans for social security:

Clinton: “My social security contributions will go up, as will Donald’s – assuming he doesn’t know how to get out of it – but what we want to do is -“

Trump: “Such a disgusting woman.”

To test the feminist theory that Clinton, as a woman, was judged much more harshly than Trump, some professors from New York University and INSEAD designed the perfect experiment. Two months after the election, they recreated the 2016 debates, but with a man in the role of Clinton and a woman in the role of Trump.

Professional actors were hired to reenact segments from each of the three debates, using the candidates’ exact words, gestures, intonation, and postures. During rehearsals, they even had a screen showing the actual debate behind them to ensure an accurate recreation of the candidates’ performances, with only the genders reversed. (For you confused Gen Z-ers, there were only two genders back then.)

The professors and their (sold-out) audience were stunned by the result. As NYU professor Joe Salvatore put it, it didn’t confirm their “liberal assumption” that “nobody would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman and that the male Clinton would appear to be the much stronger candidate,” but rather the audience hated the male Clinton and were impressed by the female Trump.

This is how Salvatore described the reactions:

“We often heard ‘Now I understand how this happened’ — how Trump won the election. People were upset. Two rows in front of me was a guy who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person next to him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to understand when it came from a woman — that was a theme. One person said, ‘I’m just so impressed with Trump’s precise technique.’ Another — actually a musical composer — said that Trump created ‘hummable lyrics,’ while Clinton talked a lot and everything she said was true and factual, but there was no ‘hook.'” (Unfortunately, the Trump boom with musical audiences was short-lived.)

One viewer said she found the [male] Clinton is “really beatable.”

I suspect the Trump-Harris debate will elicit similar reactions. Trump is Trump, a known quantity. His uncontrolled demeanor will not shock anyone. If you already loathe the man, your opinion has been vindicated. But if you don’t hate him, Trump put a lot of points on the board while Harris said nothing and did so smugly.

The debate certainly didn’t give undecided voters what they expected from Harris. As has been widely reported, they’re waiting breathlessly for some indication of what she believes and what she would do as president. After the ABC debate, they’re still waiting. They pretty much just learned that Harris comes from a middle-class family. (That regular guy routine worked great for John Kasich!)

But they know that life was better under Trump. And they know that Harris, like Clinton, is a nasty woman.

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